JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

With an increasing number of digital health apps available in the app stores it’s important to assess these technologies reliably regarding their quality. This is done to mitigate the risks associated with their use. There are many different guidelines, methods, and metrics available to assess digital health apps with regards to their quality.

Objective:

Provide a review of the current methods and frameworks that are used for quality assessment of digital health apps.

Methods:

A systematic search of literature was conducted on four databases: Scopus, PubMed, ACM digital library and IEEE Xplore. We followed Population/Patient/Problem, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes and Study (PICOS) and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology when conducting this umbrella review. The search was conducted on 26 January 2024, and searched for review articles between 2018 to 2023. We identified 4781 candidate papers for inclusion, following title/abstract screening, 39 remained. Following full text analysis, we included 15 review articles in the full review.

Results:

Majority of the review articles were scoping reviews (n=6), followed by systematic reviews (n=4), narrative reviews (n=4), and rapid reviews (n=1). Four of the 15 review articles have proposed assessment criteria for digital health apps. ‘Data privacy and/or security’ was the most mentioned criterion (13/15 review articles), while ‘Cost’ was the least mentioned criterion (1/15 review articles) for the assessment of digital health apps. Mobile application rating scale (MARS) was the most frequently used framework for quality assessment of digital health apps.

Conclusions:

There is a lack of unity/consolidation across identified frameworks as most do not meet all the identified criteria from the reviewed articles. Safety concerns associated with the use of digital health apps may be mitigated with the use of quality frameworks.